FlameRobin is a lightweight, cross-platform database administration tool for Firebird databases. It is also NOT one of my favourite tools to use because of its very lightweight nature! Nevertheless, there are times I must use it, and use it I shall, and besides, other people seem to like it, so it’s worth a post or two. Today I’ll quickly jot down a note on how to duplicate a table within FlameRobin.
First, connect to the database instance by selecting it from the explorer window and double clicking on it. Once the table list is loaded, select the table that you wish to duplicate. Click on it to launch a new information window which happens to have the following headers at the top: Summary, Constraints, Triggers, Indices, Privileges, Dependencies and DDL.
Click on the DDL link.
Copy the resulting SQL statement.
Now right click on the Tables menu option in the main FlameRobin window and select the “Create new…” menu option.
Paste the copied SQL into the window, change the table name sections to the duplicate’s desired name, and click on the Run (Play icon) button. Pressing F4 will also cause the statement to execute. If you’re happy with the report, click on the green tick button to commit your transaction, and smile as the table list in the main window magically gets updated with your new table!
The aptly named Gallery is a brilliant piece of well-support open source software, aimed at providing you with the best photo image image sharing tool to use on your own hosted website. All you need is a PHP-enabled website and an operational database, and you’re pretty much good to go.
From minimalistic all the through to as customized as a chameleon, Gallery is fully extensible and can be expanded upon by your own modules and themes if you so want. Written in a object-orientated, MVC framework, Gallery comes packaged with versioned APIs, can handle active localizations and supports a number of different DBMS.
Gallery can intergrate with blogs, general CMS systems as well as forums like phpBB, SMF and vBulletin just to name a few.
In terms of features, Gallery provides all the basic functionality like creating photo albums, adding/removing photos, administrating the albums, automatic thumbnail generation and image resizing, plus it also handles a wide variety of image formats, which is pretty important in this day and age as you can well imagine.
Like I already mentioned installation and upgrading is a piece of cake and what is nice of the software is that it comes 100% multi-user ready and comes with all the necessary user, group and permissions management tools that you’ll need to administer the site properly.
And the last little fun fact – Gallery is actually pretty much multimedia ready, meaning that it supports streaming videos, and listening to music, making it an invaluable little asset if you want to stay away from online-hosted big boy solutions like Flickr or Picasa Web, where you don’t hold all the keys to your kingdom…
So maybe you don’t always like giving Google all of your data. Perhaps there are some things you’d like to keep to yourself, thank you very much. But what about Google Analytics. That shiny, shiny tool that tells you so much about yourself (well, particularly if you are a website of course).
Well enter Piwik, the open source alternative to Google Analytics.
Piwik is a downloadable, open source web analytics piece of software, with the ability to provide you with real time reports on your website visitors, search engines and keywords used, the language they speak, your popular pages, et cetera, et cetera. Written in PHP and using MySQL, Piwik gets installed on your own webserver and once installed will return a JavaScript tag which can then be used on any website that you wish to track.
What makes Piwik particularly nice is its flexibility. Built on top of a plugin-based framework, it is easily to extend or contract the system by simply removing plugins or perhaps creating your own. Added to this is the fact that all collected data is now hosted in a local database on your machine, meaning that you can use whatever open API you want to in order to grab the information, be it XML, JSON, CSV, whatever!
Naturally the user interface follows the current Web 2.0 example and features completely customisable, draggable interfaces, making it possible in other words to produce a solution tailored completely to your own needs.
In short, this is a great little project that is currently under active development and seems to be blazing through the awards for open source projects. Well worth a look, particularly if you are keen on moving away from Google Analytics and looking to tie in your analytics reports to your own platforms.
For more information about this project, hit the Related Link below.
Some good news for all the OpenSource proponents in South Africa: The South African Government has gone ahead and adopted the OpenDocument Format as the new required standard for all official documents. They’ve even given it a nifty name, namely “Minimum Interoperability Standards for Information Systems in government (MIOS – the acronym was getting a little long so they dropped a couple of words from it).
The government wants all civil servants to be able to work with the OpenDocument Format by March and use at least one of its three approved document formats for all its published documents by the end of 2008. (If you have to know, the three formats of choice are: UTF-8 or ASCII plain text, CSC, or ODF)
Interestingly enough, their definition of ‘open standard’ seems to rule out OOXML at present.
Nevertheless, this certainly does give the OpenSource community in South Africa a little to crow about, so I’m glad they’re happy (This probably includes the ever-OpenSource-punting Merkaba as well).
Related link: http://tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=1838
